Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers” was first published as a serial in Collier’s magazine in 1954, and quickly bought for filming. The first movie, in 1956, was “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and so was the first remake in 1978, one of the few times a remake equaled or (some feel) even topped the original. It was made less satisfactorily yet again in 1994 as just plain “Body Snatchers.” And now here’s a fourth version, making Finney’s unprepossessing book probably the most-filmed post-WW2 American novel.

The setup is different here. It opens with Nicole Kidman frantically rummaging through the shelves of a pharmacy, trying to find drugs that will keep her awake. Most of the rest of the movie is an extended flashback from this scene (too much time is spent in that pharmacy). The space shuttle Patriot crashes to Earth, its debris spread from Dallas to Washington D.C., cutting a swath 200 miles wide. The government tries to gather up the debris, which they realize is covered with a growth containing spores of some kind. But it’s too big to completely hide; someone sourly notes that fragments are almost immediately for sale on eBay.

One of those investigating the wreck is Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam), who cut his finger on a piece of debris; that night, something strange happens to him while he sleeps. The next day, his psychiatrist ex-wife, Dr. Carol Bennell (Kidman) meets with a patient, Wendy Lenk (Veronica Cartwright, a veteran of the 1978 “Invasion”), who claims her husband isn’t her husband. Carol lives with her young son Oliver (Jackson Bond), and isn’t pleased to learn that after years of indifference, Tucker wants Oliver to spend some time with him. She complains about this to her doctor friend Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig), who works with colleague Dr. Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright). Meanwhile, the government announces a flu epidemic, immediately setting up inoculation centers—under the direction of Tucker Kaufman. That’s not flu vaccine being injected into all those people.

That’s about it for setup. The story almost immediately begins including frozen-faced “snatchers” stalking the streets of Washington, DC. There’s no sense of a gradual onset of the horror, so effective in the first two movies. One night, a bogus census taker tries to force his way into Carol’s home. On and on the “snatchers” come, while the few remaining normal people quickly learn that they can pass themselves off as post-infection snatchers by pretending not to have emotions. There are some good scenes scattered among what looks like movie fragments, but it doesn’t hang together.

It’s obvious why Hollywood has come back to “The Body Snatchers” time
and again. The basic story is founded on a kind of nightmarish paranoia
that almost all of us have been subject to at one time or another: what
if everyone around us was an impostor—and working against us? Finney’s
story, and the first two movies, present this theme so powerfully, so
compellingly, that it has literally become the stuff of nightmare for
many people. There’s something almost graceful, nearly sinuous, about
how the idea wraps around our lives, sends tendrils into our
subconscious.

In the first three films, spores arrive from outer space that grow into
plants that bear large, melon-like pods. These pods duplicate almost
anything nearby (in the novel, one copies a can of peaches; in the
second movie, a dog is duplicated—almost), then the duplicates replace
the originals. But the duplicated people lack something indefinable
that makes them human; it’s partly that while they have all the
memories and personality traits of the originals, they only pretend to
have emotions—people initially make complaints along the lines of “my
father isn’t my father”—and they want everyone to undergo the
duplication process. In the novel, the duplicates simply crumble into
nothingness after about six years; Finney never did link his duplicates
into the life cycle of the alien plants—at what point do those spores
appear? But the idea’s power was based on fears of alienation, not on
scientific logic.

In 1956, some critics took the pod people as metaphors for the
dominating tendency of Communist society, some saw them as stand-ins
for the proponents of the “Red Scare” of the period. Director Don
Siegel never claimed that his movie was founded on metaphors, but did
say that insofar as he DID think of the pod people that way, he saw
them as the embodiment of “conformity,” another 1950s bugaboo. In a
limited sense, the 1978 version (just out in a spiffy new DVD edition)
was about psychobabble—you can’t tell the point at which Leonard
Nimoy’s psychiatrist’s body was snatched; he talks in the same jargon
before and after—but also was in favor of individuality, even the wacky
sort embodied by Jeff Goldblum’s post-hippie character. (The movie is
set in San Francisco.) The third was on a military base, where everyone
is supposed to act pretty much the same—which undercuts the sense of
growing paranoia.

The new version isn’t quite as focused as the first two, but does make
a disquieting point: the possessed humans (they’re not duplicates this
time) around the world end all wars, everywhere. The conflicts that
lead to war are part of the price we pay for the right to be human.
This is unexpected and eerily convincing; the movie does have something
to say—but it’s not something we necessarily want to hear.

But this is only subtext, news reports from the edges of the screen.
The movie initially wrapped production in 2005—it was while he was
making this movie that Daniel Craig learned he’d been cast as James
Bond—but producer Joel Silver wanted changes made. He’d produced the
“Matrix” movies, so called in Andy and Larry Wachowski for some
rewrites, replacing debuting screenwriter Dave Kajganich, then replaced
Oliver Hirschbiegel (“Downfall”) as director with “V for Vendetta”’s
James McTeigue. The reshoots were still going on early this year.

Evidently, Silver decided to turn “The Invasion” into an action movie;
scattered throughout the film, but largely at the end, there are car
chases and other violent activity, which clash with the low-key,
cerebral nature of much of the rest of the movie. Granted, some of the
action is pretty intense—Kidman and son roar through the streets of
Washington in a police car covered with determined “snatchers” while
the hood is ablaze from a Molotov cocktail. And also granted that some
of the original material is pretty silly: inasmuch as this time, the
horror is spread by microorganisms rather than pods, the “snatchers”
pass along the infection by vomiting on their targets. The first time
this happens is unexpected and somewhat creepy, but it turns pretty
damned funny pretty damned fast.

Sometimes, that underlying theme—our very humanity is what causes wars
and other conflicts—is crudely laid out before us. A wry Russian
diplomat (a nearly unrecognizable Roger Rees) observes that trying to
picture the world without war is “to imagine a world in which human
beings have ceased to be human.” This is a bit more baldly didactic
than the movie can support—and nowhere in the film is there a
suggestion as to how we can still be human and avoid these clashes.
Kidman’s claim that things are getting “better” is weak and not
emphasized.

Dave Kajganich has been quoted claiming the pods were “campy,” and his
bacterial notion is more modern, or something. But he hasn’t worked out
the kinks satisfactorily, including the elementary question of just why
the victims want to pass along this infection. The pods, at least, were
living out their life cycle; they were driven by a biological
imperative. But bacteria? Jeffrey Wright is handed a jaw-breaking
speech intended to scientifically explain how this works, but it’s hard
to follow—and hard to want to follow. It has something to do with REM
(rapid eye movement) during sleep, and the reshaping of the victims’
DNA. But then why do they get covered with a kind of second skin during
transformation?

Maybe some consider the pods campy, but in the first two films, they
were also eerie and unnerving. There are a few scary sequences in “The
Invasion,” but overall it’s nowhere near as compelling as the first
two, and certainly won’t fit into society’s consciousness the way those
two did.

The efforts at turning this into an action movie are not only sporadic,
they take very strange forms. Occasionally, there are shock cuts to
bloodstreams—usually Kidman’s—with the cells THUNDERING along the
veins, followed by a looping, swirling camera. I don’t think the movie
needed noisy blood vessels—or car chases and wrecks, explosions, bodies
flung through the air, a pursuing helicopter—but it gets them anyway.

It has a good cast, but everyone is limited. Kidman spends most of the
film either looking worried, or behind the wheel of a car. Craig gets
to be momentarily charming, but there isn’t much to his character. We
see Northam more after snatching than before—and after snatching, he’s
the most interesting character in the movie. If the snatchers are
supposed to be emotionless, Northam didn’t get the memo: he seems
almost gleeful to be so evial and mean, especially when he’s trying to
puke into Kidman’s mouth. Josef Sommer and Celia Weston do well in
their brief scenes, and Jackson Bond is a tough little trouper, very
convincing as Kidman’s son.

The first and third versions had semi-upbeat endings, but (memorably)
not the second. I won’t reveal the ending of “The Invasion,” but my
expectations plummeted when Wright said three little words—which, in
fairness, I should not reveal here. I can say that the ending is
unsatisfying—matching the rest of the movie.